Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi stories, and so I snagged another one of his books as I was browsing through the library. The Other End of Time is the first book of the Eschaton trilogy, and I have to say that while the series may be good (haven’t read it, yet), the first book felt incomplete and disappointing. A pet peeve I have in comics and in modern books is that stories are incomplete. I sort of enjoy recurring characters, although I prefer to […]
If aliens landed, we’d still be idiots.
Reading ideas come from all sorts of places. While I’m a big sci-fi fan, I’d admittedly never heard of the Strugatsky brothers until I read an article about European dystopian games in a recent edition of Game Informer magazine. (For you cool people who don’t know about Game Informer, it’s the magazine you get an automatic subscription to when you sign up for a rewards card at GameStop stores. It’s pretty good!) I found out that the influential S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game was based on a […]
A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras.
CBR10Bingo – The Book was Better? I’ll by reviewing the book and then talking about the movie a little. This book is written by the Russian authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. The brothers were active in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and according to the book’s introduction struggled with their sense of place within Soviet Russia and within the Russian culture industry of the time. I have talked before about reading literature produced from within “enemy” cultures (enemies to the world of Western Europe and […]
“You can’t save people from the world. There’s nowhere else to take them.”
The Girl With All the Gifts is a bit slow moving at first. We start with Melanie, a precocious young girl who is being raised in captivity on a military base. She, along with two dozen other children, have various teacher who give them a variety of lessons. Ms Justineau is Melanie’s favorite teacher in part because she reads Greek myths to the class. But this isn’t a regular school; the children are kept locked up in cells and they attend their classes bound to wheelchairs. […]